Scenes are the cornerstones of novels. Contrary to the popular idea that the number of chapters is how readers measure the book, what keeps people reading are the scenes, and how you transition from one scene to the other.
Some people have the ability to write scenes that continue for pages and yet keep the reader on the edge of their seats, waiting eagerly for what comes next. Others prefer short, sharp, edgy scenes that keep readers turning the page to get to the next scene for resolution.
As you keep writing, you’ll find what works for you with regards to voice, characterisation, timing and a standard length of scenes. Until I started Rose House, my average scene length was about 500 words. I simply couldn’t figure out how to get them any longer, no matter how hard I tried.
With Rose House, I woke up one morning and realised that the length of the scene wasn’t important. It was the content. If I wanted to make that 50k word count, I needed to have content that would inspire me to keep writing those scenes, no matter how long they took.
Unfortunately, as a pantser, coming up with ideas for scenes is a lot harder than it sounds. My usual method is to sit down, stare blankly at my screen for half an hour, write one paragraph and call it a scene.
The problem with that method is that nothing much can happen in a few sentences, and every scene needs to carry the plot forward in some way. If nothing happens in your scene, it isn’t necessary to tell the story and will be tedious to write, never mind reading it!
The other problem is, no one enjoys reading lengthy scenes filled with descriptions that are only used to fill space. Unless you’re really, really good at painting pictures with words, you’re going to lose your reader with endless exposition.
So how do you combat all that when you’re planning your novel bearing in mind that you don’t usually plan anything, you just write?
First, let’s look at what a scene is. A scene is the smallest component of a story, something that happens within it to move it forward. There can be any number of scenes in a chapter, but no chapters in a scene.
When writing your novel, your basic plot looks something like this:
Beginning: Bob meets Betty.
Middle: Betty and Bob have a fight.
End: Betty and Bob make up and everything ends happily ever after.
Scenes come into play when you want to describe the following:
How did Bob meet Betty?
What happened to cause the fight?
When did the fight happen?
How did they resolve it and live happily ever after?
There is one essential rule with writing scenes - Something pivotal to the story has to happen. The problem most pantsers, myself included, seem to experience with scenes is that we write scenes like this:
Betty and Bob go on a picnic and spend hours talking about nothing in particular, staring romantically into each other’s eyes and wishing the picnic will never end.
If that’s your typical scene, then the picnic will never end for the reader, because she would have fallen asleep after the first few sentences. As a writer, you don’t want to do that to her.
The question is, how do you come up with scenes in the first place, and then make them interesting enough to keep your readers reading?
This is where Scrivener (or yWriter) comes in handy although you can just as easily do this on index cards, cut up pages of paper, in a handy notebook, or on a pile of serviettes if you’re going for the artistic writer effect. Just make sure that if you use any of the latter methods, you have somewhere safe to keep your scenes in order, otherwise you’ll lose the plot. *insert bad pun gigglesnort*
*Ahem* Sorry about that. Onward!
First off, decide how many words you want your novel to be. If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, this is easy. The target is decided for you at 50000 words. If you’re aiming for more (as an epic fantasy for example), then you’ll adjust the length or number of your scenes accordingly.
Because I used this method for NaNoWriMo, I decided that the average length of my scenes would be between 1000 and 2000 words, and I would need about 50 scenes of at least 1000 words each to get from the beginning of the story to the end.
This number seemed really intimidating to me, so I broke it down even further. Rose House is written in Multiple Points of View, from the perspectives of about five different characters. I decided that the two main characters, Jeremy and Sarah, would each have 10 scenes dedicated to their POVs and that Amy and Luke would get 10 scenes between them. The remaining 20 scenes would be split between journal entries, and the Elementals.
Depending on the format of your novel, this method may or may not work for you, but if you find yourself intimidated by the bigger numbers, take some time to break it up into chunks that feel more manageable. If, for example, you have a single POV narration, use the time line of your story to split the scenes. So that 10 scenes are dedicated to a single time period in your novel, 10 are for the next time period, and so on. How you split the scenes is up to you, but the idea is to keep some sort of manageable order without micro-managing. We are pantsers after all!
Using Scrivener you can create empty text pages in the binder. If you’re working on paper, make sure you have the allotted number of index cards, torn pages or whatever works for you. Depending on how you split your scenes, give each page a heading. In Scrivener, I had 10 pages labelled Jeremy, 10 - Sarah, 10 Amy and Luke, and 20 were left blank.
Once that’s done, start creating titles for your scenes. I generally use a simple sentence that describes what’s going to happen to the POV character in the scene. Do as many as you can, and then leave the rest of the scene cards blank. It’s not important to have them all filled at this point in time. As you start to write the actual scenes, other ideas will come to you and you’ll be able to fill the rest of the cards faster than you think. If you’re unsure what makes a good scene, remember that the Main Character of the scene has to want something - either to get it, or to avoid it - and the scene needs to answer the who, how, what, where and how of his desire. In one of my scenes for Rose House, Jeremy is desperate to get to his siblings’ class after school because Luke is often the victim of bullies. What happens when Jeremy is late leads to the idea for the title of my scene: “Amy and Luke deal with bullies.”
After writing most of your titles set yourself a daily writing goal. This is where the WriteChain Challenge comes in handy. Mine was generally to complete one or two scenes a day, since that would get me to the finish line, but it’s important to set yourself goals that don’t overwhelm you or leave you feeling like a failure if you don’t meet them. If you don’t meet your daily goal, don’t beat yourself up about it. Just try to make it for the next one. Guilt trips take all the fun out of the act of writing and are actually counter-productive.
It doesn’t matter if the scenes are coherent or fit neatly into your story’s time line. That will be fixed later. What’s important now is that you’re getting the ideas in your head down in writing in a semi-coherent fashion.
Scrivener allows you to mark your scenes in the binder in a colour. It also allows you to shuffle them around on the cork-board overview. As I finished writing each scene, I would mark it in blue, write the titles for any additional scenes that came to me as a result of that one, and then check the cork-board to see that the layout of the scenes matched the time line of the story.
I found that as the screen filled with highlighted blue titles, it was that much easier to keep going, writing more scenes then I’d thought possible. With each completed scene, I was also able to fill in the details of my plot, fleshing out what had just been a vague idea when I first started.
Then I had to figure out the time line of my story. Which is a topic for the next post; Just in Time.
I welcome your feedback, and look forward to hearing if this post helped you at all or if there are any points that are unclear. Drop me a comment and tell me how you plan your scenes. I can’t wait to hear all about it!
Check back next Sunday for the second post: Just in Time when we'll look at creating Timelines.
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